Click to viewEver since we first posted about the Democracy Player, I've been excited to get a better handle on it what it has to offer. For example, you probably already know that Democracy offers desktop integration of free internet television, making it the best tool out there for subscribing to "vidcasts," but what a lot of people don't know about Democracy is that it has built-in support for BitTorrent downloads.

Cross-platform, open source internet TV platform Democracy has released an update to their…
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That means with the right RSS feeds, you can subscribe to and download television shows over BitTorrent just as easily as you would manually subscribe to a podcast in iTunes. This week I'm going to show you how simple it is to download all of the latest episodes of your favorite television shows shortly after they air via BitTorrent and RSS using the cross platform, open source Democracy player.

I've covered this territory in the past using another open source program called TED, which is good solution in itself. However, subscribing to TV shows with Democracy is dead simple, so I wanted to offer another option for readers who still aren't thrilled with any of the available BitTorrent clients. I also wanted to highlight the kind of integrated downloading and playback we can hopefully expect more of in the future.

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Note: It's illegal to download copyrighted material. TV shows are copyrighted. Download at your own risk, etc. etc. You must have your opinions about this by now. Do what works for you.

Download and install Democracy

If you read Lifehacker, you know how to install software. So go ahead and download Democracy, install it, and run it. [1]

Find feeds for your favorite shows

Keep in mind that Democracy works like any podcast aggregator, meaning that you have to have the right kind of RSS feed for it this to work (specifically a feed that includes the enclosure tag). Luckily, there is such a feed from a wonderful BitTorrent site called tvRSS.

If you browse to the Shows section of tvRSS, you should see hundreds of television shows conveniently organized alphabetically. Find the show you want to download (say, for example, 24). You'll see a page full of episodes of that program, but you'll also see duplicates.

That's because tvRSS tracks more than one distribution group. To weed out the dupes, select a distribution group from the drop-down menu (I use EZTV, for example) and hit search. Now your results should be pruned of all the duplicates and you should see all of the latest episodes sorted from newest to oldest.

Now just copy the link labeled "Search-based RSS feed" to your clipboard and head over to your Democracy player.

Add your BitTorrent feed to Democracy

Now in Democracy, hit Control-N (Command-N for Mac) or go to Channels -> Add Channel and the address you've copied from tvRSS should already be in the text field (if not, manually paste it in). Hit OK and you should see a new entry in the channel pane. Click on your new entry (which will read "tvRSS - search-based..." - unfortunately Democracy won't let you rename feeds).

Democracy will automatically begin downloading the latest show from the feed you just added. You can cancel it by right-clicking the entry and selecting "Cancel Download," or you can let it do its thing if you want that episode.

Watching your content

Check on the progress of your downloads in the Active Downloads section. I've found that BitTorrent downloads with Democracy get pretty good speeds, especially if it's a popular torrent (as is the case for any BitTorrent client). If you've got the app running in the background, you can be sure that it'll start downloading the show you want as soon as it's available, meaning that you'll get better speeds because that's when the most people will be downloading.

Democracy does not have the same options for tweaking your BitTorrent downloads that you would find in more robust, full-featured BT apps like Azureus or uTorrent, (in fact, it has none), but if you're not one to futz around with those settings to begin with, Democracy is just the ticket.

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When your downloads complete, they're moved to the New Videos section and you can watch them whenever you want. New videos will expire in 6 days by default, but you can tweak this preference in the settings if you'd like to keep videos longer. Alternately, you can save a video indefinitely by clicking the Save button.

If you've put much time into Democracy, I'd love to hear more about what you think about it and whether you've found any killer functionality that's gone unnoticed. Personally, aside from the BitTorrent business, I've realy been enjoying some of the built-in channels, specifically the music videos offered by the Telemusicvision channel.

If you're loving or hating Democracy, let us know about it in the comments.

Related reading:

If you've got a thing for TV and technology, these related posts might really be up your alley:

Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker who enjoys a good torrent of bits every now and again. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Unfortunately for many Windows users, Democracy seems to be riddled with memory leaks. However, many Windows users seem to be able to use Democracy without the memory leak, so your mileage may vary. My experience: After running Democracy for an afternoon, I was burning over 500MB of RAM, which is insane. On the other hand, I haven't noticed any significant problems running Democracy on my Mac (though it still has a relatively hefty memory footprint). Either way, I'd love to see Democracy mature into a stronger, less buggy app, since I really do think it has a lot of potential. [back up]